Erica Friedman posts a manga reader's manifesto describing how she wants her digital comics—available anytime, anywhere, and cheaper than print.

Attention would-be creators: An English version of ComiPo!, a manga creation software from Japan, was released this week. Patrick Macias made a comic of his own to demonstrate the possibilities, and creator and critic Jason Thompson took it for a test run at Anime News Network.

Read and Discuss

Up front, I’ll say I found Usagi grating. She is also a good-natured, caring person. However, she is also very lazy and seems to always need rescuing. She certainly starts out having the steeper incline of development and maturity needed. She is the least likable character in the series. The other guardians are much more mature and developed persons.

I’m actually terrible at keeping my manga collection organized. None of my bookshelves have only manga on them, but I’ll be moving soon so maybe I’ll get the chance to try and devote space just for manga. Since the books themselves aren’t organized, but I do try to keep my Google docs up to date so that I know which volumes of a series I need to buy next. So my advice is: keep yourself constantly up to date with what you own so you don’t buy duplicates and waste your hard-earned money! Really be meticulous about it because once you start second-guessing your list, it makes buying manga a lot more nerve wracking.

As a female reader who's weathered the beauty/fashion industrial complex, a lot of the humor in Flowers and Bees, especially in the earlier volumes, comes from Masao's botched beauty treatment and his dawning realization of the sheer amount of time, money and effort that goes into something that no one else sees ($500 pants when he has to wear a school uniform, waxing). Anno's female characters have big eyes, big hair, big mouths and tiny waists; it is the males in this comic who are obsessed with their perceived physical flaws ("I have short legs!" replaces breast-size anxiety).

The JManga news team reports in on Summer Comiket, the huge doujinshi marketplace in Tokyo, with plenty of cosplay photos. And at Okazu, Erica Friedman reports on the Girls Love Festival, one of only two exclusively yuri doujinshi events in Japan.